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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

I have the problem of boot-up the Suse Linux Enterpise Server 9, after I attached a external storage.

The problem is because of the following:

Before attached to external storage:
swap is mounted as "/dev/sda1"
root (/) is mounted as "/dev/sda2"

After attached to external storage:
External Storage partitions are mounted as "/dev/sda1", "/dev/sda2", and so on.
swap is mounted as "/dev/sdb1"
root (/) is mounted as "/dev/sdb2"

We can tell BIOS to bootup using the Internal SCSI drive, but after bootup to SUSE, the hardware dectection will dectect external storage first then only dectect local SCSI drive, which make the mapping of devices (/dev/sda1, etc) problem.

I manage to resolve the problem by modify the Grub "menu.lst" and "fstab", but as and when I put in more external storage LUNs, or remove the LUNs, I need to modify again.

Is there anyway I can fix the boot up hardware dectection sequence? To let the local SCSI harddisk to dectect and assign to "/dev/sda1" first before external storage?

Or at least we can fix the "/dev/sda1" to swap partition, and "/dev/sda2" to root partition.

I experienced a similiar situation on compaq hardware. I had a seperate scsi card which would take priority over the other scsi devices during the bios intialization. I ended up using the smart start programs to configure the scsi card and the scsi devices to intialize in the proper sequence. Once I did that, SLES was able to boot and initialize the devices correctly.

There's two things you need to do:
1. Edit modules (modprobe?).conf and change the order in which the modules are loaded. If it loads the external SCSI driver before the internal disk driver, you will see this every time you add storage. Change the module loading order so that your internal disk driver is FIRST.
2. If you are using ext3 partitions, you can label partitions using e2label, and then mount them like 'mount LABEL=mypartition', and set them up the same way in /etc/fstab (just put LABEL=whatever instead of /dev/sda, etc). That way, no matter what changes, it will mount the drive by partition label, not partition device name.